Watch: 7 Great Train Scenes from the Movies

In the movies, trains may often be symbols of progress, and the inexorable forward march of time — but, let's face it, they're also ideal venues for madcap high-speed action. While The Lone Ranger's CGI-overboard mayhem didn't exactly work out, cinema history is chockablock with exhilarating on-the-rails clashes in which heroes traverse train roofs, swing and leap between cars, and smash their way through crowded compartments. With trouble lurking around every hairpin turn and under every narrow overpass, locomotive set pieces are defined by speed and peril. And as proven by the following selection of superior train sequences, they've also produced some of our most enduring thrills.

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The General (1926)

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Buster Keaton's silent remains the standard-bearer for locomotive-themed comic ingenuity. The story of a stout-of-heart train conductor pining for his lost love and beloved train "The General," Keaton's classic is a work of near-constant invention, filled with iconic sights like the star riding on the train's side rods, messing around with cannons, dodging explosions, and being sprayed by water spouts — all gags that Keaton performed by himself, without the aid of stunt doubles or special effects. A showcase for Keaton's physical and comedic dexterity, it features nearly every feat imaginable on a train, culminating with this finale, the most expensive — and one of the most impressive — set pieces in silent film history, involving a collapsing bridge sending a real train plummeting into a ravine.

There isn't a venue where James Bond hasn't beaten the pulp out of foreign scoundrels, and that includes a train, which provides the setting for one of his most memorable scuffles in From Russia with Love. After a bombing at a Russian Visa office, Sean Connery's secret agent calmly navigates his way through an underground passage overrun with rats and evades pursuing Russian spies by hopping aboard a passenger train, where duplicitous gun-toting spies await him. What ensues is a showdown of slam-bang intensity, with 007 — apparently not quite tired out from his earlier bedding of Daniela Bianchi's double-crossing beauty — using canny, brutal techniques to fell his adversary.

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The Train (1966)

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John Frankenheimer's knack for propulsive, muscular action was in full effect here. Burt Lancaster's WWII Resistance leader attempts to delay the progress of a Nazi train loaded with stolen French art, all while not harming the vehicle's precious cargo. Though the film as a whole is defined by sustained suspense (as well as a few outstanding crashes), the stand-out moment finds Lancaster and his crew hunted by a Spitfire fighter jet — thus leading Lancaster to furiously attempt to seek shelter from aerial gunfire in a tunnel. Shot in gorgeous wide angles and edited for maximum tension, it's a blistering black-and-white sequence that also boasts some phenomenal Frankenheimer cinematography from the Spitfire's POV, gazing down like a hawk upon its rail-bound prey.

Runaway Train (1985)

There was a time not so long ago when Eric Roberts not only starred in awesome action films, but actually received Academy Award nominations for them. Roberts and Jon Voight's escaped convicts race through Alaska on an out-of-control train in Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train (based on an Akira Kurosawa screenplay), which may be the most thrilling of all train-related films. Certainly, its conclusion is a thing of bleak beauty, with Voight saving Roberts and Rebecca De Mornay by making the sacrificial decision to disconnect the lead engine car from the rest of the train. After so many expertly calibrated thrills, including scrambles atop the vehicle as it races through harsh wintery weather, Voight's final journey — scored to soaring Vivaldi opera, and accompanied by a quote from Shakespeare's Richard III — proves tragically haunting.

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Throw Momma from the Train (1987)

Hilariously riffing on Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, Throw Momma From the Train finds Billy Crystal trying to do the titular deed to Danny DeVito's mother-from-hell, played with great crustiness by Anne Ramsey. In the film's centerpiece, Ramsey flees Crystal because she thinks he's trying to kill her, DeVito attempts to stop Crystal from committing homicide, and Crystal strives to save Ramsey from harming herself. That confluence of misunderstood intentions results in chaotic wackiness of the finest order, with Crystal preventing Ramsey from falling off the speeding vehicle by holding her upside-down, and pulling her to safety, by the ankles, only to be kicked off the train for his selfless act by an ungrateful Ramsey.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

Of all the outrageous stunts performed by Tom Cruise in his Mission: Impossible franchise, none is as memorable as his death-defying feats at the conclusion of the Brian De Palma original, in which Cruise's spy pursues Jon Voight's baddie across a speeding train's roof, all as Voight attempts to flee to safety via Jean Reno's helicopter. Cruise connects the two vehicles by cable, which is when things really get wild. Cruise desperately clings to the train's outside, and then leaps onto the helicopter to blow it up via explosives, before being thrust back onto the train, where he oh-so-narrowly avoids being decapitated by the flaming chopper's rotating blades.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

The best big-screen Spider-Man outing also features one of comic-book cinema's finest set pieces, a fierce showdown between Spidey and Doctor Octopus that leads the two super-powered foes to the top of a city-spanning elevated subway car. Their battle is a showcase for the two characters' extraordinary abilities, as well as a non-stop succession of great moments, from Spidey re-boarding the train by using his webs in slingshot fashion, to his saving passengers whom Doc Ock has thrown to their death by catching and then tossing them into safety webs, to a final moment in which the hero, risking life and limb for the greater good, earns his Christ-like credentials.